


you who have come from my old country

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, Gen, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Magnus After Alec, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Some People Are Dead But They Do Not Die In This Fic, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22376623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: On a crisp day in September, Magnus goes up the steps of the New York Institute for the first time.A century later, Magnus returns to the city he loves to find it changed for the better.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 113
Kudos: 326





	you who have come from my old country

**Author's Note:**

> You know that thing where a scene assails you out of nowhere and goes _write me write me write me_ until you yield, derail your day, and put the little menace to words so it stops bugging you?
> 
> This has been me today.
> 
> This is a far future fic, don't @ me. Sometimes a body likes to think about their favourite immortals way past the show timeline.
> 
> If you want to find me on social media, I am on:
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen) and my fic hashtag is #junefic

On a crisp, cloud-strewn day in September, Magnus goes up the steps of the New York Institute for the first time.

The steps are new. The limestone looks slick and straight, unbent by the passage of either the years or the residents of the Institute.

For Magnus, it's been a lifetime. New York City is ever a harbor of his heart, but he's been gone—for decades. Not from the city, not entirely, but certainly from this park and the church that mysteriously keeps evading condemnation by mundane authorities. The glamours and obfuscation wards girding it are holding up as intended, then.

His return is a favor for a friend. Maybe he needed the push.

The wind that tugs at his bound hair still smells the same. The sky is maybe a clearer blue than he remembers.

"Good morning, sir," says the young Shadowhunter, twenty-one if she's lucky, at the door. "Can I help you?" Her brown, heart-shaped face is set in courtesy that forms a poor front for something like fascination. Magnus glances her up and down. Black synthetic leather, neatly buckled holster, tight Dutch braid that somehow both meets every regulation imaginable and gives her a dash of personal style.

 _Can I help you_ still rings odd to him from a Shadowhunter mouth. Times have changed. Here he is, trying to move with them.

"Yes, actually. You had a ward keystone that's been acting up?"

"You must be Ms. Loss's friend! She couldn't come, so she said she was sending another warlock up." Even if her appearance is impeccable, her conversation bubbles like a teapot coming to boil. "This way, please. She said you'd know our wards?"

"You might say I do." Magnus clasps his hands behind his back. Right behind them, on the steps that are no longer there, Alec told him he loved him. And the world rang like a great bell only he could hear.

 _I love you, too_ , he said, with the merest scrap of understanding of what it would come to mean that after a century of romantic drought, he loved Alexander Lightwood.

What it still means.

In the here and now, Magnus follows the sprightly Shadowhunter inside and politely submits to her polite security screening.

"Oh, you're already in the system. So you have worked for us before." She taps a few keys in confirmation. Unknown to her, the wards—some of them his own handiwork, familiar as lovers—whisper against his magic. He feels for the subtle break in the pattern that would signal a compromised keystone. 

"It's been a while. I was abroad." _Having a moment of peace._

"How is Ms. Loss? Nothing serious keeping her?"

"A bit of a family situation," Magnus assures her. "It's under control. Would you mind showing me to this rebellious keystone?"

She steers him through the foyer and into the ops center. He tells his feet to keep a straight line.

The busy space is still a sea of blue screens and displays, but the people bustling among them are a varied lot. Shadowhunters with their military manner, but also a pair of werewolves sleeping in a shaggy pile under a side table, a vampire in heated discussion with a nephilim officer—the windows are more heavily tinted than Magnus remembers, the lights all artificial. Magnus even spots a Seelie, her hair a riot of acorns and leaves, supporting a limping companion toward the infirmary.

He looks at the Shadowhunter by his side. She moves through utterly familiar terrain here. None of the tension that a Downworlder could once cause by their mere presence is evident in her body language.

She pushes past a mixed group in the middle of a mission briefing. "Sorry about the hubbub. We've been having a positive infestation of Raveners in Long Island City. Some rare subtype, they can avoid detection runes. _Then_ you add the shapeshifting, and it's a mess."

"There is a story I've heard before," Magnus says.

"It's not like much changes here in the Institute."

She must be taken aback by his abrupt bark of laughter. He still can't stop it from escaping.

"Did I say something funny?"

Even when it might compound the laugh, he allows himself a sigh. "Let's say, my dear, that when you measure perspective in centuries, you see how much this place has changed."

"I'm sure you'd know," she says, clearly not offended. "I know there's still some older vampires and warlocks who won't even come into the Institute. The Circle Rebellion still makes them wary, or older history than that."

That's what they call the Uprising now. The massacres and horrors of it are slowly being examined with a critical eye even by Alicante scholars. The name still heaves the blame for near universal hatred entrenched in an entire people onto the shoulders of one fanatical group, but it is a step forward.

You have to name your past to move into the future.

"That and plenty more," Magnus says, affecting mildness. _You've lived through centuries of war. What scares you?_

He focuses on his surroundings in favor of the memory of Alec's voice. Through there are the doors to the training hall. That way is the armory, where a dark-haired woman is bent over a seraph blade clamped to a workbench, and Magnus expects her to stand back and knead her brow like Isabelle would do when stymied.

Ghosts upon ghosts. Under their feet are the sub-cells, which Magnus still doesn't want to think about.

Down the corridor is the Head of the Institute's office. They pass the corner where Magnus found Alec the day after his thwarted wedding, and they had their first halting talk about immortality. _You watch the people you care about grow old and die._ Even then, Alec's thoughts circled the pain Magnus would inevitably face.

Now he knows which keystone the Shadowhunter is taking him to. It's in the northwest corner. Are there any other particular memory holes he can fall into on the way? "I see you've kept much of the old decor."

"Were you here for it, sir?" his guide says. "The Rebellion? I probably shouldn't ask that."

There is the elevator down to the columbarium. Some Shadowhunters have their remains taken to Idris, the common haven of the nephilim, but many Institutes keep their dead close to home.

Not the Lightwoods. At least, not the New York branch of the Lightwoods. Maryse is buried in a mundane cemetery, and since communal Shadow World burial grounds are rare, her three eldest children were laid to rest next to her.

An unorthodox solution. Perhaps the least of those they enacted in life.

"Sir? I didn't mean to offend."

Magnus shakes himself internally. It doesn't show in his poise. "Curiosity is a healthy trait." He kind of has to slap the smile onto his face, but it stays. "I was here. You might say this is where it all started—the changes that made the Institute as you know it."

"Right, of course. With the Lightwood Protocols." She stops to etch a rune onto a small display beside an armored door. "And Alec and Isabelle Lightwood. They were the last Lightwoods to run this Institute."

There it is, Alec's legacy, his life's work: the great revision of the Accords, now known as the Shadow Realms Accords, because the Shadow World as a whole has a flair for the dramatic. That was why Alec finally left the Institute to his sister—so he could go to Idris to hammer out policy that would outlast the individual, small-scale changes they'd carved out in New York. Equality under law for all the Shadow Realms. The gradual righting of past wrongs, yes, but also safeguards for a better future.

When the last of the Protocols was signed, that night after the toasts and dances and stiff collars, Alec leaned into Magnus outside the Accords Hall and whispered, _Babe, I'm tired. Can we just go somewhere for a while?_

Between the endearment and the admission that his steel-spined husband was surrendering to a base mortal need, Magnus could hardly refuse. In truth, the reforms earned him—them both—such infamy that it was probably wiser to let tempers cool for a while on all sides.

So, it was the easiest thing to tell Alec, _I think we could both use a moment of peace._

They had several years of peace after that. You can't close a calling; no work is ever truly done when the world itself is the subject. But they stepped back and let others pick up the burden.

They were good years, that last handful that Magnus spent with Alec. There is a pain that comes from the abundance of love, one Magnus had often tried to dull himself to. The truth that once you have met, you must part.

Even so, Magnus loved him, loved him, loved him. From that morning on the Institute steps to their last morning together.

He still does, of course. Like he loves Ragnor, and the family he found in this city around Alec, and many others who have come and gone from his arms along the years.

It took him so long to come back here. Perhaps it was time.

As he touches the keystone, the faulty central ward springs easily to his fingertips. It's no longer the original he once laid here. He recognizes Madzie's work, the effervescent imprint of her magic even in the fixed, semi-permanent weavery. She's grown so much, too. It's no wonder the Institute relies on her, in spite of her youth.

To her, the Uprising is the stuff of stories. She hasn't grown up in a Shadow World free of problems or prejudice, but she's been spared so much.

"This shouldn't take long," he says to the Shadowhunter. "There's just a small misalignment, though it's good you called a warlock right away. Left unattended, this little rogue could have set off a lot of other problems."

"Thank you—I didn't catch your name?"

"Neither did I yours."

"Of course. That was rude of me." She extends her hand. "Sophie Fairchild, sir. My great-grandmother worked with the Lightwoods. She was married to their adoptive brother. So, it's not a blood connection, but I'm sort of the last Lightwood of the New York Institute."

This time his smile is slow, but it spreads without his conscious input, slight and completely genuine. He shakes her offered hand. "Then you might say there's two of us. Magnus Lightwood-Bane, at your service."

Her whole face crumples in amazement, and for a brief, brief moment Biscuit looks at him from her eyes, in the way she gives herself wholeheartedly to the delight.

"I don't _believe_ this. You're—you're Great-Uncle Alec's husband. You're in a million old family photos and I didn't even realize!"

Her joy is infectious, even to Magnus's somewhat sore heart. "It's the hair. Madzie hardly recognized me."

"Like she doesn't change her hair twice a month." Sophie's grin bespeaks easy familiarity. "She wasn't kidding when she said she'd send us the best." So much for that _Ms. Loss_ business then, Magnus thinks, tipped with amusement. It makes him nothing but happy if Madzie is that welcome in these once-forbidding halls.

A hundred years ago, few Shadowhunters would have grinned so in the company of a warlock. A hundred years from now—well, even warlocks cannot see the future.

Still, Magnus looks at the corridors filled with people, listens to the exchange of reports and orders and companionable banter, and the thing that unfolds in him is that old, wayward friend: hope.

_Alec would be so proud to see all this. To see you all._

"Now then," he says, "shall we put these wards in order?"

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Lines' by Wang Wei.


End file.
